


The Benefits of Being a Smartass

by htbthomas



Category: Limitless (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Humor, Slice of Life, Workplace Relationship, Yuletide 2015, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 18:51:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5509133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/htbthomas/pseuds/htbthomas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Brian Finch can be a real pain in the ass. Other times he can be pretty great.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Benefits of Being a Smartass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neonhummingbird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neonhummingbird/gifts).



> Hope you enjoy your treat!
> 
> Thanks to my beta, Lexie. :)

Rebecca loves her job. 

At least that’s what she tells herself every morning. She gets to help capture bad guys every day and work with a crack team. Her boss respects her. Her partner trusts her with his life.

She tells herself this again when she’s crawling hip deep through cockroaches. She tries to ignore the crunching sounds and focus on getting to the end of the tunnel. She started out with her eyes mostly closed, but that was worse, hearing the noises and not being sure where they were coming from. So she presses forward, mouth tightly closed and teeth gritted.

Not Brian. He’s chattering away, talking about the migratory patterns and pheromones and varieties and the over thirty-three types of bacteria they transmit. She shut her mouth and she wants to close her nostrils, too—hell, any orifice. She’s going to be scrubbing down for a week. Burning these clothes.

When Brian insisted they had to enter the building this way, through insect-infested crawl spaces, she thought he was screwing with her. It would be his style. Brian-on-NZT is brilliant, but he can be a pranking asshole, too. But no, they really had to crawl through the roaches.

When they come out the other side, Rebecca looks down at her suit, stained brownish now. She closes her eyes and holds back vomit. Just barely. But Brian looks just as bad, his alternative band T-shirt a candidate for the garbage can. He glances at her clothes and frowns apologetically. “Sorry,” he mouths, then he looks at his own and shrugs. 

They catch the guy, though. That makes it okay in the end. Mostly.

That he pays for her dry cleaning is really what helps.

* * *

She walks in on Brian drawing on the floor. 

No, it’s some sort of parchment paper, but enough of it to cover at least a ten foot square area. He’s got an ink pot and—is that a quill? He seems to be drawing a map. By hand.

“Google Maps down today?”

“Nope!” He scratches down some flowing cursive in the margins beside the coastline of the Hudson River. “But they don’t have this map in their database. I’m comparing the modern coastline to the coastline from a map drawn in the 1700s.”

“From memory.” It’s a stupid comment, but she still has a hard time wrapping her mind around his abilities on NZT.

“Saw it on a field trip in fourth grade.” He scratches at the map some more.

She takes a step forward to get a better look. “Do we think the diamonds are buried there?” 

“Bup bup bup!” he cries out. “Don’t muss the ink, it’s not dry yet!”

She looks down at her foot, where the toe of her pumps are touching the edge of one carefully drawn line. She lifts up, and sure enough, there’s a smudge. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, you’re going to have to do that over again.”

He carefully crab-walks back to that part of the map, looks at it with a tilted glance, then says, “Not needed. It’s…” He points to his head. “In here.”

Rebecca frowns. “If it’s all in _there_ , why do you have to redraw the entire map?”

“It’s part of my process,” he says, and goes back to work.

“Never question the artist,” Mike drawls from a chair nearby, turning a page in his magazine.

Sometimes she wonders why the department doesn’t nip these flights of fancy in the bud. They could already be out there with a dive team.

But late that night, after he’s gone, she finds a lovingly detailed drawing of the view from her apartment sitting room window, on her desk. Gallery quality. It’s not signed, but it doesn’t need to be.

She frames it and hangs it in her cubicle.

* * *

Rebecca ducks behind a pillar. A bullet clips the edge, raining plaster down on both Rebecca and Brian. They’re trapped unless they can get from this side of the room to the other. Backup is at least ten minutes out. And she can’t tell how many hostiles there are. Or how close the hostiles are to finding Brian and Rebecca.

Brian is writing in the air, a diagram only he can see. 

“I hope that’s something that can help us!” she whispers under the gunfire. She doesn’t want to give their position away.

“It should. There are five of them.” He points to empty air as he explains, “One behind the file cabinet in the north corner, one behind the pillar parallel to ours, one behind the reception desk, and two laying down cover fire.”

“Great,” she says. She doesn’t have time to ask how he knows from a single glance. Probably something about bullet flight paths or math. “Now how do we get past them?”

“Easy. We roll under the desk here, take out number one. Then crawl past these shelves, pop up and catch one of the guys laying down cover fire. From this position, we can eliminate three, four and five. It’s just like an obstacle course!”

“We?” she asks, eyebrow rising.

“Did I ever say ‘shoot?’ I’ll bean them with office supplies, you handle the bullets.”

When their backup arrives, all five hostiles are down, either dead or unconscious. Brian raises a stapler and blows on the end like it’s the smoking barrel of a gun. 

That evening, Brian shows up at her place with a couple of hot lattes. “Your arm okay?” 

She didn’t think he noticed. It’s just a graze, something she could bandage and take care of herself. “Yeah. You didn’t have to come over; this is part of the job.”

He rolls up his sleeve and shows her a matching bandage. “Twinsies.” He smiles, but his eyes don’t dance with humor. By now the NZT has worn off—she checks his hands holding the cups. There it is, the slightest shake. He was never trained for this, no matter how cool he plays it when under the influence.

“You want to come in, or are those both for me?” 

They talk about anything and everything but the shootout, and she watches the tremor slowly leave his hands.

He’s still on her couch the next morning when she gets up for breakfast. Non-NZT Brian likes Lucky Charms.

* * *

Rebecca doesn't have to wonder if Brian is in yet this morning. She can follow the sound of ear-piercingly loud singing, and the trail of escaping employees unlucky enough to have their desks nearby. 

She enters the file room with her hands over her ears. “What the f—”

It's all she gets out before glass shatters. She ducks out of habit and training, but when she uncovers her head, instead of seeing bullet holes, she sees a line of wine glasses in varying sizes and styles lined up on a table. 

Brian is writing notes on a whiteboard. “Hey, Rebecca,” he says without turning. “Was that two or three seconds that time, Ike?”

Ike looks up from his stopwatch, a set of protective headphones on his head. “2.3 seconds.”

Brian claps his hands together in excitement. “Getting faster!” He writes down the total in a column on the board. “I’ve almost got it, I think…”

“Let me guess,” Rebecca says, looking around hopefully for another set of headphones. “All of this is so we can figure out how our suspect shattered the glass at the crime scene?”

“No!” At her frown, he adds, “I mean yes, in a tangential way. But this is so cool! I’ve never tried breaking glass with my voice before—I mean, I knew it was possible, but my voice was pretty untrained before, which fits with the style I play, but doesn’t provide the pure strength and clarity needed for glass-breaking.”

She purses her lips, impressed. “ _You_ broke all of these. With your voice.”

He nods, happily.

She turns to Ike, pointing to her ears. “You got another set of those?”

It turns out that a pretty entertaining few hours can be spent that way. Each glass needs a different pitch and intensity, and half the fun for Brian is seeing how quickly he can match that specific resonance. There are two that he can’t get to break at all, no matter what he does, and she feels strangely comforted by that.

“All right, enough,” Rebecca says after the tenth attempt. Ike had already left, saying he had a physical therapy appointment to get to. “There’s a criminal to catch.”

“Oh, I already sent a text to Naz with the specifications of the sonic device they’re looking for, like, a couple hours ago. This was just a way to pass the time.”

Rebecca’s eyes close in disbelief. But thinking back, he _had_ said that this was only tangentially related… She stands. “I’m going to go do some paperwork.”

“Wait!” His voice stops her before she can turn all the way around. He’s holding up the two unbreakable glasses and a bottle of champagne. “Don’t go without celebrating!” 

“Celebrating what?” For god’s sake, it’s 11:30 in the morning. What could they possibly have to celebrate?

“Our six-month-aversary, of course.” He gives her a cartoonish frown. “Don’t tell me that you forgot…”

Has it really been that long? Despite all the craziness of working with Brian Finch—maybe because of—the time has passed very quickly. “Fine,” she says, holding out her hand for a glass. “One sip. I’m still on the clock.”

He opens the bottle with a flourish and pours just a little, a tiny smile on his face. She finds herself mirroring it.

Later, after they’re both off for the day, they share the rest of it on the roof in companionable silence, just letting the sounds of the city wash over them.

Already six months? She looks over at him, bobbing his head to music only he can hear. She’s ready to see what the next six will bring.


End file.
